Cell Lysis in Microfluidic Devices Employing DC Electric Currents

Electrokinetics is a widely employed technique for particle manipulation in microdevices. Combination of electrophoretic, electroosmotic, and dielectrophoretic, among other forces are used with AC and/or DC electric fields inside microchannels for different applications. In this work, cell integrity of E. coli was evaluated in a microchannel after applying DC electric fields, as a method for cell lysis for DNA recovery. The use of surfactants along with electric field gradients, created by the inclusion of insulating posts in the channel, caused cells to lose viability and release cytoplasmic material to the medium. This method can be used as an alternative for cell lysis and applied to protein, RNA, or DNA recovery.